Day 41 – What We Couldn’t See

Day 41 – What We Couldn’t See

The latest Trump “atrocity” in early March was lack of testing. To this day the media blames coronavirus, in totality, on Trump’s lack of tests. Our inability to quickly identify and isolate those early US infections is what caused the outbreak, so say the media. They like to highlight what Trump “could have avoided” (which is also false based on what we now know – it had long already been here). But they never talk about what being test-shortage blind also meant – that the models were setup for failure from the start.

We based all our predictions on what we could see: confirmed cases. Again, remember that shortage of tests? That meant only those most symptomatic were receiving the tests – the ones in the hospitals. To compound the invisible, we’re now finding out up to 50% of those infected are asymptomatic. I noticed in the beginning when the graphs of rise in confirmed cases started showing up on the nightly tv, they never included rise in daily tests for context. That ignited my skepticism.

From there came all the curves, and peaks, and models, and predictions of 2.2 million Americans dying, later being revised to a few hundred thousand with social distancing. We battened down in the face of the impending tsunami that would overwhelm our hospitals. Being here in NYC, in the epicenter, it was absolutely beautiful seeing people come together the way they did. We helped one another, felt for one another and collectively cheered for the frontlines. The curve began, it curled up quickly, but stalled. A collective holding of the city’s breath. The stall turned into a plateau, we’d passed the peak before we even realized it, and the numbers began their way down.

Our leaders congratulated us for beating the curve with our staying at home. But, they warned, if we didn’t continue to stay at home, the predicted peak would come right back. We assumed we had changed the inevitable with our collective actions, but we never asked the most obvious question: was the inevitable even real to begin with?

I don’t mean the disease, of course it’s real. Although that’s what the lynch mob would claim I’m saying if I dared be skeptical about the official narrative in which the absurdly wrong is always right. The disease is real, but what we thought we knew about it isn’t.

Everything is based on a two-part foundation: when did the US infection start, and how many in the US have it? The RO of the virus (how quickly it spreads), the death rate, the hospitalization rate – these are the core virus characteristics the models use to predict its spread, its curve and its impact.

Today, in NYC, with a population of 8.7 million, the NY Post reports 141,754 confirmed cases, over 36,000 hospitalizations and 15,411 deaths. The kicker is that roughly 5,000 of those deaths have been assumed – they were deaths that were never tested but “exhibited coronavirus symptoms.” They go back. So we end up with:

Also today, New York released its first randomized antibody study. It suggests a 21% of those in NYC actually have had coronavirus. There’s been a slew of randomized antibody studies around the country, and the world. They are all saying the same thing: we were off by magnitudes in how many people we thought had actually been infected.

So, population of NYC is 8.7 million. The 21% infection rate from that study would come out to 1,841,700 who’ve actually had it. Use this actually infected number with hospitalizations and deaths and we end up with:

Of course the models were wrong. Look at the numbers they were using, look how under-reported they were, remember, the “shortage of tests!”

And here’s why it matters. Using the hospitalization rate we did, a model will predict if 50% of the population in NYC is infected, 1.08 million will be hospitalized. Based on the likely more accurate 1.95% rate, 84,825 people would be hospitalized. 84k hospitalizations is serious, the disease is real. But the million hospitalizations in the doomsday models never was. To be clear, this is the difference:

Every day we learn more and more, see how much we didn’t see. Yet we still cower in fear of these antiquated projections that were never based in reality. Society still shames those who question the antiquated predictions, and accuses those protesting of killing others by spreading the disease. Those woefully inflated models, even though they never came to be true, have become ingrained in society’s conscious as fact. Those predictions which were never even possible based on what we now know about coronavirus, are still used as the end all argument for any intrusive governmental order or measure. Any questioning of the predictions, the real peak potential, are shunned as science-deniers, by those who ignore up-to-date data and bludgeon you with disproven, old predictions.

How did something so obvious become so forbidden? How did people asking rational, logical questions get censored on social platforms for “endangering” others and mocked by most others for their tin-foil hats?

The real story here is how did we miss it? Or rather, how did we refuse to see it? The one thing we admitted to from the start was that we didn’t know how many people actually had it. Yet, that was the one place we didn’t go looking when the models were so so wrong.

The partisan blame game has kicked back in, the journalists are more obsessed with Trump than any of these questions, all the upper class and well off virtue signal to the struggling with freshly printed pay-outs while decrying those who protest to go back to work. They decry them as science-deniers, the beaded sweat on their brows glistening with irony as they bludgeon these “neanderthals” with antiquated, disproven predictions.

Over 26 million filed for unemployment the last 5 weeks.

We’re clinging on to what never happened, and ignoring what actually is. I don’t understand how we got here…